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Monday, November 05, 2007

Is it a crime that I still want you, And I want you to want me too

The astonishing thing about the current Republican Party is their stubborn refusal to let go of the anvil pulling them to the bottom of the lake. They continue to own the very things that are destroying them, i.e. GWBush's 24% support for the war. Giuliani is only the latest example:

Rudy Giuliani said Monday that if his achievements as president are as good as the crime-reduction results of his New York police commissioner, a man now under criminal investigation himself, "this country will be in great shape."

Giuliani, in an interview with The Associated Press, acknowledged mistakes by Bernard Kerik, who was police commissioner when Giuliani was mayor. But he said crime reduction for the city was more important.

So crime reduction is more important than the Police Commioners' own alleged crime. Sounds like situational ethics, moral ambiguity and relativism, things that Right-singers always rail against:

All this should be quite clear, but there is one aspect of moral relativism that confuses many believers in Judeo-Christian moral absolutes. They assume that situational ethics is the same thing as moral relativism and therefore regard situational ethics as incompatible with Judeo-Christian morality. They mistakenly argue that just as allowing individuals to determine what is right and wrong negates moral absolutes, allowing situations to determine what is right and wrong also negates moral absolutes.

This is a misunderstanding of the meaning of moral absolutes. It means that if an act is good or bad, it is good or bad for everyone in the identical situation ("universal morality").

As usual, what Prager is saying is that if you do it, it's moral relativism. But if he does it, it's situational ethics. Either way it's still a human deciding what's right. How hard is that to understand?

And so what if Kerik is bent as a dog's hind leg, as long as he produces results, he's A-OK:

As for Kerik, Giuliani said, "It was a mistake not checking him out as thoroughly as I should have. ... I don't like surprises. I don't like to find out things that I haven't found out myself. Not that it hasn't happened to me before. But I try to tighten up the whole thing and make sure we do a better job in the future."

Federal prosecutors in New York have spent more than a year pursuing criminal charges against Kerik, reportedly including bribery, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, providing false information and conspiracy to eavesdrop. Kerik rejected a plea deal in the spring, but meetings have continued.

"I made mistakes. I will continue to make mistakes," Giuliani said. "But what are the results? What kind of results do I get? What Bernie Kerik did wrong did not implicate what the results were for the public. What he did wrong, he's going to have to pay for."